Google: A trip down the memory lane

Tristan Greene is a sailor gleefully writing about living on dry land.

Google is turning 19 and we wanted to celebrate the world’s most popular search engine by showing off some of Alphabet’s family photos. We hopped in the Wayback Machine and took a look at Google.com from its birth to today.

The company was founded in 1998, and even though Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing” was atop the Billboard charts, there wasn’t much to see:

Nope, we didn’t whip this up in Microsoft Paint, this is the earliest screen shot of Google.com on web.archive.org that we could find.

The first real version of Google.com came later, and a new age of text-based-search dawned upon a population that would soon turn a silly company name into a verb. Seriously, go Google it.

This is how Google looked when the rest of you were partying like it was 1999.Then, off came the training wheels. The year was 2000 and what was left of a population decimated by Y2K were searching for “how to live in the postapocalyptic wasteland created by a tiny software glitch” on a search engine that was officially no longer in beta.Y2K did not, in fact, decimate the world’s population.

Things looked pretty much the same for a few years until Google hit its “awkward teen phase.” Check out the ridiculous font and crazy punk-rock resolution in this image from 2003.

The beauty of Google.com over the years lies in keeping it simple. The page has always had an understated elegance reminiscent of a clean-slate.

The above image has a weird symbol next to the colourful “Google” text and there’s absolutely no possible way to determine what the tiny letters “TM” mean.

Things don’t change a whole lot, Google.com-wise, for the next 7 years. Then out-of-nowhere, in 2010, it drops this bombshell of an update — prepare your eyes for:

Things hadn’t changed much until this “radical” redesign that destroyed pre-conceived notions like “change can’t be subtle.”

If that doesn’t blow your mind out of your skull and into your lap: sit down for this updated Google.com design from a year in which the most Googled question beginning with “what is” was “What is twerking?”

This looks pretty familiar to anyone who started using computers in 2010 and stopped in 2016.I know what you’re thinking: Google hasn’t changed since 2013 so that’s the end of this story. Well you’re wrong.

If you took the time to look it up you would have come across this story that explains why the next image is from 2015, when this happened: